Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine

Summary

Tamar Amar-Dahl argues that Israel is a product of Zionism whose ideology — centred on the Negation of the Diaspora and a Jewish national state in Eretz Israel — was realised in a de facto bi-national Palestine, producing a permanent state of war, a security-dominated political culture, and an unresolved discrepancy between the Zionist self-image and demographic and geopolitical reality (Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, PDF p.10-12 / printed p.1-3). Part 1 covers the Introduction, Chapter 1 on Zionism’s ideology, and Chapter 2 through PDF p.52 on the perception of the Orient, Zionist thinkers and the “Arab question”, the Palestinian question after 1948, and Shimon Peres’s view of the Arab world in David’s Sling (1970). Part 2 completes Chapter 2 — Peres’s Periphery Doctrine, Arab nationalism and Nasser as archenemy, and the conclusion on the regional conflict and the Palestine question — and gives Chapter 3 through PDF p.96 on Israeli democracy: “ethnic democracy” against “ethnocracy”, Kimmerling’s “Jewish Code”, the refusal of a written constitution, and the Lavon and Shin Bet affairs as tests of security against the rule of law. Part 3 completes Chapter 3 — Sprinzak’s “Elite Illegalism”, Peres’s 1995 memoir defence, and the conclusion on the civil militarization of Israeli democracy — and gives Chapter 4 through PDF p.140 on war policy: Kimmerling’s “Civilian Militarism” and Dayan’s 1956 Ro’i Rotberg eulogy, the retaliation policy and the Sinai-Suez Campaign of 1956 as regional war in exchange for the French alliance and the Dimona reactor, the “Policy of Opacity” on nuclear weapons and the Vanunu Affair, and the opening of the Lebanon 1982 account, ending at the Sabra and Shatila massacre and the start of the section on war policy as a social-political consensus. Part 4 completes Chapter 4 — Peres’s de facto support for the 1982 war, the South Lebanon “security zone” and its escalation to Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, the targeted killing of Yahya Ayyash, and the conclusion that war secures Jewish statehood under a “Security Code” of determent and depoliticized security — and gives Chapter 5 through PDF p.184 on Jewish statehood and regional peace: Zuckermann’s “Peace Ideology”, Grinberg’s “Security Myth” and “Imagined Peace”, the young state’s refusal of compromise in 1948-1955 (the Alpha and Johnston plans, Peres’s 1955 “Reconciliation Does Not Mean Security”), the 1978–1979 Egypt treaty as the peace work of the Zionist Right, and the Oslo process of 1993–1996 as the peace work of the Zionist Left, breaking off in the “Palestinian Option” section on the hybrid “Oslo Regime”. Part 5 completes Chapter 5 and the book: Peres, Oslo’s architect, did not stand behind its associated goal of a Palestinian state; after Rabin’s assassination he implemented Oslo II while refusing permanent-solution negotiations, courting Mafdal, halting the separation wall and declining the Beilin/Abu-Masen paper; and the Conclusion names the political order’s two founding myths — the myth of Eretz Israel as the land of the Jewish people and the safety myth — as what makes a political resolution impossible, since Israel can neither split the land nor accept a bi-national state, leaving the Palestinians an “out-group” and peace only “imagined”.

What the file is

Book, English translation of Das zionistische Israel. Jüdischer Nationalismus und die Geschichte des Nahostkonflikts (Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012), published by Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, 2017, translated from the German by Olga Thierbach-McLean (PDF p.5). 209 PDF pages; printed pagination runs 1-197 plus front matter. Open access via Knowledge Unlatched, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 (PDF p.5). ISBN 978-3-11-049663-5; e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-049880-6 (PDF p.5). Text copy is clean with === PDF p.N === markers; PDF p.1, 3, 7 and 9 are blank in the text copy. Dedicated to Hans Mommsen (1930–2015) (PDF p.6).

Section by section

Introduction (PDF p.10-12 / printed p.1-3)

Israel originates in 19th-century European Jewish nationalism as Christian hatred assumed racist anti-Semitic form and emancipation failed; Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896), the First Zionist Congress (1897) and the World Zionist Organization proclaimed a Jewish state outside Europe, with the “negation of the diaspora”, emigration from 1882, and Eretz Israel as chosen territory (PDF p.10). After the murder of millions of European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1948 is, apart from 1945, the decisive turning point; statehood, sovereignty and military strength became cornerstones of the Jewish-Israeli self-image, and by the 21st century the Jewish nation state is the raison d’être of Israeli polity (PDF p.10). Against this, Israel has no internationally accepted territory, a large non-Jewish population, and a permanent state of war; “security” is a key code, and the fight for statehood still dominates policy, society, military and political culture (PDF p.11). The book’s questions concern Zionist ideology’s implications in bi-national Palestine, the political order produced by the discrepancy, and whether democracy can be sustained in permanent war; its five chapters cover Zionism’s ideology, the view of the enemy, democracy, war policy, and whether peaceful settlement is compatible with Israel’s reason of state (PDF p.11-12). On the Palestine question, still denied in political culture, Israel stands “with its back against the wall” in “obstinate defiance”; the account is “critical without being accusing, differentiated without seeking to expose, and sober without being detached” (PDF p.12 / printed p.3).

1 Zionism and the Ideology of the Jewish State — The Jewish Diaspora and its Negation (PDF p.13-17 / printed p.4-8)

Zionism aimed to terminate the “abnormal” statelessness of the diaspora; the “negation of the diaspora” is its ideological core (PDF p.13). Shimon Peres’s subway/bus analogy and shtetl as “passing station” illustrate the Zionist view (Peres and Littell 1998: 3–4, PDF p.13). Other readings are set beside it: Simon Dubnow (1931) on diaspora as punishment, messianic hope among the Orthodox, and, via Rashi, as blessing/scattering as sowing (PDF p.13-14); reform/liberal acceptance of assimilation; diaspora nationalism; and the Zionist rejection, bringing “the messianic teachings in a modernized political form” (PDF p.14). Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin defines “negation of exile” as deeming settlement and sovereignty in Palestine the “return” to a home “imagined, prior to its ‘redemption,’ as empty”, with exilic culture described in orientalist terms (2005: 167, PDF p.14); Zionist historians Baer, Ben-Sasson, Scholem and Dinur embedded it as historiography’s basis, reading the present as “fulfillment of Jewish history” (PDF p.15). Brubaker on teleological nationalist historiography and Shlomo Avineri on the state as “common denominator” preserving collective Jewish existence against assimilation are given (PDF p.15). Orthodox opposition, Neturei Karta’s Torah-based rejection extending loyalty “to the Palestinians who live in the Holy Land of Palestine according to divine will” (PDF p.15-16), the Canaanites under Yonatan Ratosh, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s 1954 charge that the secular state rebels against religious tradition while using its symbols, promoting “hypocrisy, cynicism and nihilism”, follow (PDF p.16). Religious Zionism, sharing the negation of the diaspora, backgrounded messianism via culture/education, took messianic form under Abraham Isaac Kook in the 1920s, manifest after 1967 in Gush Emunim (founded 1974); on the “Judaization of the land of the forefathers” religious and secular Zionism barely differ (PDF p.17).

1 — On Nationalism (PDF p.17-20 / printed p.8-11)

Zionism was inspired by European nationalism (PDF p.17). The “premoderns” [as printed], Weber, Gellner — “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way around” — and Hobsbawm are surveyed, with the point that nationalist societies produce nationalist historians, including for Jewish nationalism (PDF p.18-19). Anthony D. Smith’s ethnic-group account, significant for Zionist historiography, answers constructivism’s weakness on nationalism’s popular absorption: common name, myth of origins, history, culture, territory and solidarity, with nationalism as the ethnic group’s survival strategy (PDF p.19-20).

1 — Thinkers and Critics of Zionism (PDF p.20-26 / printed p.11-17)

Hess and Herzl recognised a “secular religion” as emancipation/assimilation failed; Herzl is quoted: “The Jewish question still exists. It would be foolish to deny it” and “We are a people – one people”, the question national/political, to be solved by a sovereign state outside Europe ending diaspora life, with nation defined by neither territory nor common language but by threat and shared religious background (PDF p.20-21). Ahad Ha’am’s Cultural Zionism dissented: gradual settlement building Hebrew national culture as centre for the Diaspora, a state that would be “a Jewish State, and not merely a State of Jews” as long-term natural development, against Herzl’s “cosmopolitan national concept” in Altneuland (1902) (PDF p.21-22). Both currents were secular-national, at times anti-religious, yet Moshe Zuckermann argues a religious momentum was inherent: the idea of a Jewish state preceded territory and population, Eretz Israel’s religious charge contradicted secular aspiration, the land was claimed as “land promised to the Jews”, and religion was the only link between “the Baghdad merchant, the Polish carter, the German-Jewish Grunewald professor and the Yemeni cobbler” (PDF p.23). Ethnicity defined religiously — expressed in the Law of Return — makes Zionism a modernity project with an element “adverse to the concept of a civic nation”; the present collective is cast as “the other”, “the enemy”, and the self-image rests on ethnicity not citizenship (PDF p.24). Hannah Arendt (1945) called Herzl’s Zionism “the uncritical acceptance of German-inspired nationalism”, its separation principle and flight to a “land without a people” apolitical and naive (PDF p.24-25). Peres’s The Imaginary Voyage (2000) closing crowd, gathered by ethnic-biological belonging regardless of belief or politics to hear “If I forget you Jerusalem, may my right hand be severed”, exemplifies the ahistorical, apolitical relation to Zion (PDF p.25-26).

2 Zionist Israel and its Enemies — opening and The Perception of the Orient (PDF p.27-29 / printed p.18-20)

Chapter 2 asks who stands in the way of the Zionist vision. The “Arabs of Eretz Israel” were granted no room in it and became its Achilles’ heel; the “Arab question” became the movement’s focus, extended regionally in 1948 when five Arab armies intervened and Israel seized 78% of Palestine in the Nakba, then returned after 1967 to a local “Palestinian question” in the occupied territories (PDF p.27). Via Raz-Krakotzkin, Said’s Orientalism is indispensable: Zionist discourse did not challenge the Europe/Orient dichotomy but sought assimilation into the West, attitudes to Arabs ranging “from romantic desire to a total denial”, creating the “‘new Jew,’ whom Zionism wished to define as a new European, and not an oriental”; immigration was “the transformation and regeneration of the Jew; that is, the overcoming of oriental elements” (PDF p.28-29).

2 — Zionist Thinkers and the “Arab Question” (PDF p.29-38 / printed p.20-29)

Herzl barely considered Palestine’s population, offering the West Jews as “a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”, with “barbarism” faceless and Islam/Arabs unnamed; Altneuland expected Arab gratitude for raised living standards, integration conditional on adapting to Western civilisation (PDF p.29-30). Max Nordau: Altneuland as “a European unit in the Orient”, no “relapse into barbarism”, and in 1907 “the missionaries of culture” extending “the moral borders of Europe all the way to the Euphrates”; The Zionist-Israeli historian Yosef Gorny (1933–) classes this as nationalist-separatist, on an Arab question arising since the beginning of the Zionist settlement and increasingly in the wake of the First World War (PDF p.30-31). The altruistic-integrationist alternative is Yitzhak Epstein’s “The Hidden Question” (1907), urging integration as right from the moral as well as the realpolitik point of view — a favourable reception by the Palestinians would benefit both, progress for the Palestinians and a homeland for the Jews — with Semitic cooperation and compromise (PDF p.31). Labour Zionism moved the other way: Ben-Gurion (1910) nationalised Arab hostility, “Fight for Hebrew Work” excluded Palestinians, and market separation preceded the state, later formulated as “Security and Peace” (PDF p.32). Berl Katznelson, in Anita Shapira’s account, practised stalling/blanking-out under “maximalist Zionism”: Palestinians “have no right to keep the Jews from re-shaping Eretz Israel”, their majority changeable “through immigration, land acquisition and settlements”; separation was pragmatic (democracy would advantage the majority) and orientalist (Arab society as backward), the two peoples “completely separated from each other”; shortly before his 1944 death he held Zionism compatible with “actual, real morality” even against the majority’s will, while also saying no Arab would be “expropriated, expelled or deported” and willing emigrants would be helped (PDF p.33-35). Peres, his student, in late 1996 described Palestinians as “a talented people” who “have never been a people – there never was a Palestinian people until very recently”, “eaten up by violence and terror”, land-obsessed in an age when “science is more important than land” (Peres and Littell 1998: 79–80, PDF p.36); Amar-Dahl, via Raz-Krakotzkin and Shafir, reads this as paternalistic orientalism separating the two histories, explaining Palestinian statelessness by intrinsic traits and rejecting Zionist responsibility: Peres “blatantly” contends Israel has virtually no share in the Palestinians’ situation, so it is “none of its concern”, prompting the questions whether the Palestinians are the unadmitted archenemy of Zionist Israel or a defeated/smashed enemy unlikely to endanger its existence; the two conflict spheres are not seen as completely separate, the “Arabs of Eretz Israel” being considered part of the “Arab world” (PDF p.36-38). The enemy image then shifts historically: the Arab world/Nasserism/1973 as main danger in the first three decades, Palestinians controlled after 1948/1967, and from the 1980s — 1979 Egypt treaty, failed Camp David autonomy, 1982 Lebanon, Intifadas 1987–1992 and 2000–2004, failed 1990s process — the Palestinian question again dominant and, since 2000, unsolvable; officially Palestinians are individuals of differing status, not a national collective (PDF p.38-39).

2 — Israel and the “Palestinian Question” (PDF p.40-46 / printed p.31-37)

By land acquisition the movement held little more than 6% of Palestine before 1948; in the 1948 war Israel occupied 78%, against Resolution 181’s 55%/45% division, the remaining 22% going to Jordan (West Bank) and Egypt (Gaza) until 1967 (PDF p.40). Figures given: Jewish share 10% (1900), 16% / 156,000 (1929), a third in 1947; about 750,000 Palestinians left in 1948–1949, about 160,000 remained; 1952 totals 1.4 million Jews and about 1.2 million Palestinians in the whole territory; about 200,000 more Palestinians left the West Bank in 1967; 2003 and 2015 totals are also given (PDF p.40-41). Israel pursued de-nationalisation/fragmentation, a Palestinian state became taboo, return was prohibited while the Law of Return (July 1950) granted every Jew citizenship rights, and expropriation proceeded under the Law of Fallow Land (1948), Absentees Property Law (1950, including “present absentees”) and Land Acquisitions Law (1953), with education controlled to marginalise those who remained (PDF p.41-42). About 160,000 Palestinians were naturalised in 1949, in connection with UN admission on May 11, 1949, but kept under military government until December 1966 under British 1945 Defence Regulations, controlling permits, movement, settlement and resources — a “first experience with occupation” now blanked out (PDF p.42-43). After 1967 the new territories were called “occupied” but treated as “liberated”, settled as “Judea, Samaria and Gaza”, with no naturalisation of the “new Palestinians” (PDF p.43-44). Camp David autonomy was agreed with Egypt (Begin/Sadat, Sinai returned) but not realised; 1984–1990 grand-coalition settlement and anti-PLO policy followed; the June 1982 Lebanon war, proclaimed against PLO terrorism, aimed at a new regional order and averting Palestinian autonomy, expelling the PLO leadership after Arafat declined a Palestinian state in Jordan (PDF p.44). The First Intifada (December 1987) recast Israel as “Goliath”; Madrid (October 1991) failed; Labor’s 1992 victory brought Oslo (1993, 1995), first recognition of Palestinian rights and the PLO, and the Palestinian Authority (PDF p.45). Its failure is explained in part here: division is held blasphemous not only by the Right and religious Zionism but by the Zionist Left/“peace camp”, which refuses shared sovereignty and embraces Eretz Israel as the Jewish people’s land; orientalism underlies the civilian-military order (PDF p.45-46).

2 — Israel and its View of the Arab World (PDF p.46-52 / printed p.37-43)

Peres’s first-three-decades texts use generalised “Arab world”/“the Arabs” and a siege motif — “We are a people under constant threat and siege” (1965) (PDF p.46-47). David’s Sling (1970), ch. “Conflict at the Abyss”, is quoted at length: “Its prime feature is the totality of Arab hostility”, “The Arab purpose is all-absorptive – the destruction of Israel and the annihilation or banishment of her inhabitants”, the source lying not between Arabs and Israelis but in Arab states’ internal tensions, seven wars in twenty years, only Lebanon having “tasted democracy”, states that “are not States who have armies but armies who have States”, and Arab communication in which “Truth finds it difficult to wend its way through the thickets of Arab communication” (Peres 1970: 10–12, PDF p.47-49). Amar-Dahl notes the contradiction: hostility interconnects the histories while territory — the actual connecting issue — is expunged into an “all or nothing” zero-sum logic prohibiting compromise; “No compromise can satisfy them. It is the Arab goal to abolish Israel, not to change a political situation” (Peres 1970: 9–10, PDF p.50-51). The second feature, “present mentality” — warlike mood plus backwardness — is, via Yael Krispin (2002), an enemy image of Arabs as “malicious, inferior, not willing to compromise”, “primitive and extremely concerned about their dignity, aggressive, uneducated and socially backward”; instability is ascribed to Arab traits rather than colonial history, civil institutions and a middle class are said to be absent, and Arabic itself is charged as decorative, non-binding and violent, underpinning that peace is not negotiable (PDF p.51-52).

2 — Israel and its View of the Arab World, continued; the Periphery Doctrine (PDF p.53-55 / printed p.44-46)

Peres’s relativisation of his judgment on Arab communication still leaves the “peculiar nature of the Arabs” prey to manipulation by Arab regimes; the region’s destiny is made to depend entirely on an inner-Arab change, Israel being “a State planted in an international suburb which is torn by constant disturbances”, and the Hebrew original’s use of “pogrom” projects the Eastern European Jewish experience onto the Arab-Israeli relation (PDF p.53). The Arab world is unknown and fear-inspiring, regional integration unimaginable before 1970; from the mid-1950s Peres, as Deputy Director-General of the Ministry of Defense, formulates the “Periphery Doctrine”, seeking non-Arab and non-Muslim allies — Iran, Ethiopia, Turkey, the Christians in Lebanon, the Kurds — in a mainly military cooperation including arms trade and training, developed after the Suez War of 1956 to counter Nasser’s Arab nationalism and the 1958 United Arab Republic; Peres in 1958: “We are looking to draw nearer to an environment that will cooperate with us, and not one that is capable of exterminating us” (PDF p.54-55).

2 — Arab Nationalism as Israel’s Archenemy (PDF p.55-57 / printed p.46-48)

Gamal Abd al-Nasser was the enemy par excellence from 1952 until his death in 1970; after his military defeat in 1956 he scored a political victory when Israel was forced to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza by March 1957, and Arab nationalism gained momentum through the 1958 Syria-Egypt unification, Palestinian forces in Jordan, and Nasser’s support for the Palestinian cause (PDF p.55). Peres in 1970 reads Nasser as torn between a reform movement and a messianic one — wanting to be an “Egyptian Kemal Ataturk” and “the modern Saladin” at once — and calls him “a grave disappointment – to the world, to Egypt itself, to the Arabs and to Israel”; even on the Palestinians Peres presents Nasser’s catastrophe for them as purely “an Arab affair”, omitting Israel’s role — the separation discourse of two isolated histories (PDF p.56-57).

2 — Conclusion: Between Regional Conflict and the Question of Palestine (PDF p.57-60 / printed p.48-51)

Political Israel deals with the conflict on two planes, the local Palestinian question and a regional conflict with the “Arab world”; the May 1948 invasion by five Arab armies expanded the Arab question spatially and consolidated the Arab environment as archenemy, in a list of wars from 1948 to the Gulf War of 1991, with Egypt the most dangerous antagonist until the 1978 peace settlement and the theatre shifting north to Lebanon from the 1980s (PDF p.57-58). At the heart of every front, Amar-Dahl argues, is the border shift of 1948 and 1967 — the Palestine question — but because Eretz Israel as the Jewish people’s country is a pillar of the reason of state, Israel discusses a depoliticised “Palestinian question” in security and military terms instead, ascribing the confrontation to an “all-absorptive hostility” of the “new Goyim” rather than to land; historically it has realised Herzl’s Political Zionism and Katznelson’s maximalist-separatist concept, displacing the Palestinians physically and mentally into an “out group” (PDF p.58). The Palestinians are at once the beaten enemy, kept in check militarily — Israeli Palestinians factually under domestic-intelligence observation and denied equal status after military rule was suspended in 1966 — and a nation slipped from control, claiming statehood, whose pan-Arab backing threatens the state concept; the question was delegated to the military and disappeared from public awareness until the First Intifada in late 1987, and even Oslo left Israel’s maxims of “military dominance”, “Jewish freedom of settlement in Eretz Israel” and “open borders”, and the core, Eretz Israel, untouchable, so the conflict is integrated into the political order and depoliticised — its core refused a location in Israel’s own war, settlement or population policies (PDF p.59-60).

3 Israeli Democracy and the Zionist Project — opening (PDF p.61-62 / printed p.52-53)

Chapter 3 opens on the tension in the self-definition “Jewish and democratic state”, apparent already in the Declaration of Independence of May 14, 1948, which promises Jewish immigration and the Ingathering of the Exiles together with “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”; the conflicting priorities are Eretz Israel’s “Judaization” and liberal values, and the “Jewish Code” — Baruch Kimmerling’s term — remains the main pillar (PDF p.61). The definitions are surveyed: liberal, constitutional and concordance democracy on one side; “Ethnic Democracy”, “Jewish democracy” and “theo-democracy” on another; and, from writers who take the whole territory under Israeli hegemony since 1967 as the object, “apartheid”, “herrenvolk democracy”, “a hybrid of democracy and military occupation” and “Ethnocracy”; on the French Revolution meaning of liberal democracy — the same civil rights for all citizens — Israel hardly qualifies, because the raison d’état of a “state of the Jewish people” by definition prefers Jews, citizens or not (PDF p.62).

3 — Israeli Democracy: “Ethnic Democracy” or “Ethnocracy”? (PDF p.63-68 / printed p.54-59)

Sammy Smooha’s Ethnic Democracy describes ethnically divided states with democratic forms in which one hostile ethnic-national collective dominates the state and appropriates its apparatus for its group interests, individual rights for Palestinian citizens notwithstanding; refusal to recognise Israeli Palestinians as a national minority is justified by the Zionist master narrative — recognition would undermine the exclusive Jewish right to Eretz Israel, ground a claim to autonomy and territorial separation, and, in the security motive Smooha quotes, define them as an enemy linked to the Palestinians in the occupied territories (PDF p.63). Amar-Dahl’s critique: the term, like “Jewish and democratic”, denies the bi-national reality; Smooha wishes the model stable and bridges equality and favouritism by an intellectual balancing act, differentiating it at all costs from a “herrenvolk democracy” and casting it as “a realistic compromise between ethnic national state and democratic regime” — while applying it only within the pre-1967 borders (PDF p.64-65). Oren Yiftachel’s Ethnocracy, applied to all territories under Israeli control, is by definition undemocratic: “An Ethnocracy is a non-democratic regime which attempts to extend or preserve disproportional ethnic control over a contested multi-ethnic territory”, unstable, with expansionism and resistance in constant conflict; its evidence is the legislation ensuring the Jewish character (right of return 1950, citizenship law 1952, the 1964 Supreme Court ruling, the 1985 Basic Law amendment barring parties that would change the definition), and the double process of “Judaization” and “de-Arabization” (PDF p.66-67). Yiftachel’s main obstacle is the absence of a definable Israeli demos: the ethnos, not the demos, rules; extraterritorial Jewish bodies — Jewish National Fund, Jewish Agency, “Zionist Federation” — exercise unelected political power, and “geographic dynamics” breach the borders through settlement, so “‘Israel,’ as a definable democratic-political entity, simply does not exist”; Yoav Peled in 2007 argues Israel within the 1949-1967 borders has since 2000 moved from ethnic democracy towards ethnocracy, citing the denial of family reunification and a plan to move the West Bank border westward in the “Arab triangle” of Galilee whereby 150,000 to 200,000 Israeli Palestinians would lose citizenship — “The curtailment of rights is in itself the actual goal” (PDF p.67-68).

3 — The “Jewish Code” and Israeli Democracy; Choosing the Western Model (PDF p.68-73 / printed p.59-64)

In both models the primacy of the Jewish ethnic group is uncontested; the dispute is the relation of “Jewish” and “democratic”. Kimmerling’s “Jewish Code” rests on the taken-for-granted equation of the religious and national aspects of Jewish identity: Israel is a “state of the Jewish people”, not of its citizens, its democratic institutions strictly limited to the framework prescribed by Zionist hegemony — a “theo-democracy” or “Jewish democracy”; in the Yishuv this was a “processual democracy” whose rights were grounded in belonging to the Jewish community, and the status-quo agreement with Agudat Israel on the eve of statehood made Shabbat, kosher observance in public institutions, Halakhic family law and religious autonomy in education the fundament of the order, on the Ottoman “religious millet” framework of 1922-1947 (PDF p.68-70). The Western orientation was not a matter of course — Mapam and Maki had a Soviet orientation and the USSR supported the founding and arms supplies in 1948 — but was chosen, on Kimmerling’s account, for organised American Judaism’s support, Ben-Gurion’s admiration of American society, and the elites’ wish to distance themselves from a “backward” Middle East as hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries arrived; the Declaration blends religious and secular legitimation, and Adi Ophir’s contradictory patterns in it leave the choice between the Jewish-particularist and universalist paths undecided (PDF p.70-72). Ben-Gurion and Mapai defeated a written constitution — the religious coalition would reject a secular constitution, it would restrict Mapai’s dominance, and it would obstruct nation-building by immigration and settlement; Ben-Gurion in January 1949: “Our state is the most dynamic in the world and is being reshaped daily. Every day new Jewish people come into the country and every day abandoned land is liberated”; David Bar-Rav-Hei added that a constitution “is not enacted at the beginning of a revolution, but at its end”; only ten percent of Jews lived in Israel in 1949, and the Knesset’s June 13, 1950 commission was given no deadline — the human-rights Basic Laws came only in 1992, without constitutional status, so the demographic and geopolitical projects were never obstructed by a constitution that would have had to clarify the borders and the Palestinian citizens’ status under the military government of 1949-1966 (PDF p.72-73).

3 — Military and Politics; the Lavon Affair (PDF p.74-85 / printed p.65-76)

With immigration, settlement and security as leitmotifs, the military became guardian of the Zionist project and the Ministry of Defense, 1948-1958, the most powerful cabinet department (PDF p.74). Peres in David’s Sling propagates the compatibility of militarism and democracy — a coup is “purely fanciful”, the danger would be “from perverted civilians and not from a misguided soldiery” — against two scholarly paradigms: the dichotomy/civilianisation paradigm of Janowitz, Horowitz and Lissak, for whom Israel resembles Athens not Sparta, and Uri Ben-Eliezer’s “Nation in Arms”, with its shared ideology, obscure civil-military boundaries and apolitical self-image, anchored by Ben-Gurion’s Mamlachtijut and the 1949 Military Service Act (PDF p.74-76). The Lavon Affair: in July 1954 Unit 131 of Aman ran a sabotage operation in Egypt — fire bombs in Alexandria mail boxes from July 2, charges at American cultural centres, Philip Natanson’s arrest on July 23 when a charge exploded in his pocket — without the political leadership’s authorisation; the Cairo trial began December 11, 1954, one agent suicided and two were executed in late January 1955; the Olshen-Dori “two-man commission” could not determine who gave the order, and Pinchas Lavon resigned although his responsibility could not be established (PDF p.77-78). The security establishment of the first years is reconstructed: the “Sde-Boker government” of Ben-Gurion ruling by proxy through Peres and Dayan, Dayan’s cover-up and alignment with Gibli, and Peres’s resistance to Lavon’s programme for politically controlling the military, which would have curtailed his own room in a Ministry conceived as a “closed structure of a separated security empire” — a closed-off kingdom the Knesset, government and judiciary could barely supervise (PDF p.79-81). In 1960 the affair reignited: Ben-David’s and Cohn’s investigations confirmed forged and destroyed documents, false testimonies and coercion of witnesses; the Aman secretary Dalia Carmel-Goldstein testified the July 19, 1954 order letter was a forgery; the “seven-man commission” on December 25, 1960 concluded Lavon neither gave the order nor knew of it, but Ben-Gurion’s “raised hatchet” speech refused the verdict, the Jerusalem intellectuals’ petition of January 11, 1961 warned for democratic values and against the sacrosanct “honor of the military”, and Ben-Gurion forced Lavon’s dismissal from the Histadrut and removal from the party list, and in 1964, on Eshed’s official version, judged Lavon solely responsible (PDF p.81-84). Eshkol closed the affair with Lavon’s exoneration; Ben-Gurion left Mapai and in late June 1965 founded Rafi, taking Peres and Dayan into opposition; Kimmerling reads the affair as a generational battle — the “Old Guard” based in party and Histadrut against the younger generation based in the security department — whose “Boys” returned through the May/June 1967 crisis, Dayan as minister of defense, and Peres taking the Defense Department in 1974 (PDF p.84-85).

3 — The Shin Bet Affair of 1984-1986 (PDF p.86-96 / printed p.77-87)

Two decades on, security was cemented into the political culture and the conflicting priorities of security and the rule of law are illustrated by the Shin Bet Affair, set among the 1980s scandals — the Nafsu Affair, the Pollard Affair of November 1985, Iran Gate and the Vanunu Affair — which disclose the “Israeli order”: the institutions, political culture and elite habitus committed to the reason of state and “Judaization”, alongside the state’s democratic-constitutional conception (PDF p.86-87). On April 12, 1984 four Palestinian teenagers from Gaza hijacked the Bus Line 300 from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon; stopped at Deir al-Balah, two hijackers were shot in the rescue and the other two, after a brief interrogation by Yitzhak Mordechai, were handed to the Shin Bet and executed illegally on the orders of its chief Avraham Shalom, in the presence of the press; the Zorea commission, into which Shalom inserted his own man Yossi Genossar as a Trojan horse, found the two died of skull fractures by unidentified security-force members, and the Blatman investigation of June 4, 1984 ended with Mordechai framed, then acquitted on August 18, 1985 after a seven-minute hearing and promoted (PDF p.88-89). Shalom’s deputy Reuven Hazak, with Rafi Malka and Peleg Radai, discovered Shalom had acted on his own initiative and on October 14, 1985 demanded his resignation; Peres, meeting Hazak on October 29, 1985, read the move as a “coup attempt” — “Naturally the leader has to be protected” — and told Hazak “I will believe the leader” and to go on educational leave, beginning his fierce controversy with Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir, who held the law sufficient for security while Peres treated the security apparatuses as almost sacral and untouchable (PDF p.89-90). Zamir, convinced by the three dissidents that Shalom had misled both commissions to evade responsibility for the kill order, demanded the dismissal of the four involved; Peres refused, stalled, and defended Shalom — “My duty is to fight terrorism, and for this purpose I need the best man. This man is Abrum [Avraham Shalom], so let him do his work” — and before the Knesset on June 30, 1986 argued that an investigation would force the service to present secret precedents and deny the defendant equality, since “fighting terrorism is essentially impossible without secrecy” (PDF p.91-93). Zamir filed a suit with the police and told the press on May 30, 1986 that withholding the facts violated “essential aspects of democratic rules”; he was ousted on June 1, 1986, and President Chaim Herzog pardoned the four suspects on June 25, 1986 — Negbi’s “a rebellion against the constitutional state and the rule of law” — yet a police investigation followed, all four resigned by the end of 1986, and Harish closed the case at the end of December 1986 with no doubt the hijackers were killed on Shalom’s orders, Shamir held responsible neither for the killing nor the cover-up (PDF p.94-96). The closing section begun here, “Security, Rule of Law and the Israeli Order”, reads Peres’s conduct as deep commitment to an order centred on security, in which the prime minister could assert himself against press and law because the public is excluded from security-political matters, and rule of law, integrity, morality and “truth” take a backseat (PDF p.96; section continues in part 3).

3 — Security, Rule of Law and the Israeli Order, conclusion; Conclusion: Civil Militarization of Israeli Democracy (PDF p.97-100 / printed p.88-91)

The Shin Bet closing section concludes that questionable intelligence methods are deemed admissible provided they stay excluded from public debate; Peres’s 2000 statement — “In the first fifty years Israel fought for its physical existence, in the next fifty years it will be fighting for its moral identity” — is read as subordinating law to national security while statehood is still being shaped (PDF p.97). Ehud Sprinzak’s “Elite Illegalism” is quoted at length: leaders are not antidemocratic in principle but their commitment to universal legal principles is very low, and legalism “never was an integral part” of the system the Zionist parties established; Shamir, Peres and Rabin were shaped in 1940s Palestine “when almost everything was permissible” (PDF p.97-98). Peres’s 1995 memoirs still cling to his 1986 truth, create the impression the secret service’s guilt was never conclusively established, and answer Nahum Barnea’s charge of a “selective way of narrating” with “facts are a subjective matter”; Amar-Dahl argues Barnea’s power-maintenance reading falls short — Peres protected the Shin Bet out of conviction about the Israeli order, accepting damage to his authority and moral standing, and depoliticised the affair in his reappraisal (PDF p.98-99). The conclusion credits Peres, from civilian positions, with a central contribution to Ben-Eliezer’s “state-spawned praetorianism” and the civilian militarization of Israeli democracy: the security apparatuses, stylised as “guardians of the nation”, set the tone as “security experts”, security is depoliticised and removed from public debate, and the historically emerged “Jewish democracy” is the product of an order corresponding to a “Jewish-Israeli nation in arms” — war is an integral part of this democracy; Peres (1970): “If the Israel democracy faced any danger at all, it would be from perverted civilians and not from a misguided soldiery” (PDF p.99-100).

4 Israel’s War Policy in the Service of Zionist Israel — opening; Militarism in Israel (PDF p.101-106 / printed p.92-97)

Chapter 4 opens on Zionism’s ambivalence over violence: Anita Shapira’s The Sword of the Dove hypothesis of a Yishuv “defensive ethos” turning hesitantly into an “offensive ethos”, with the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 as watershed, against two notions — Berdyczewski’s and Nordau’s “muscular Judaism” and the “New Jew”, with violence by Jews read by Fackenheim and Schweid as counter-violence by the ultimate victim, and Ahad Ha’am’s plea for “moral superiority” and rejection of violence (PDF p.101-102). Traditional Israeli scholarship is unwilling to speak of Israeli militarism despite the military’s prestige, budget and military-industrial complex, presuming a stable democracy and a “people’s army”; Ben-Eliezer and Kimmerling address it explicitly (PDF p.102-103). Kimmerling’s three dimensions — political-violent, cultural, and cognitive — culminate in “Civilian Militarism”: military mindsets internalised by government, elites and society, the military as warrantor of “national security” granted priority as an organisational principle of the polity (PDF p.103-104). Dayan’s eulogy at the grave of Ro’i Rotberg on April 30, 1956 is quoted in full — “For eight years they have been dwelling in refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes we are turning their land and the villages where they and their forefathers dwelt into our home”, and “without the steel helmet and the cannon’s mouth we cannot plant a tree nor build a house” — and Kimmerling’s seven codes are drawn from it, followed by the routinization of war, the dissolution of the politics/military boundary, and, via Reuven Pedezur, Ben-Gurion’s separation of “security” from “politics” in 1949-1956, which let a small group push through the “offensive ethos” against Sharett’s “defensive ethos” (PDF p.104-106).

4 — The Sinai-Suez Campaign of 1956; Regional War in Exchange for an Alliance with France (PDF p.107-117 / printed p.98-108)

The campaign is the climax of the “little border wars”: defence against refugee return (“infiltration”) by border settlements, border police and expulsion or killing, and the retaliation policy — from the Haganah in the 1930s, targeting perpetrators, families and tribes — exemplified by Qibya in October 1953, where sixty-nine Palestinian civilians were killed and Ben-Gurion publicly denied the measures; retaliation served revenge, deterrence and, on Morris’s account, a permanent emergency strengthening Mapai and binding the immigrant society, and it expanded from the returning Palestinians to the Arab neighbour states, with Egypt deploying the Fedayeen after the Gaza attacks of February and August 1955 (PDF p.107-108). The historians disagree on its link to October 1956: Morris treats the border skirmishes as an escalation factor, David Tal roots the war in the Israeli-French alliance as a counterperformance with no direct border-war link, and Golani assumes a loose connection — Israel “in search of a war”, Dayan instrumentalising retaliation; Bar-On’s hardliner concept made deterrence a cornerstone, war “part of the defense strategy”, while Amar-Dahl notes the doctrine’s two problems — escalation risk, and that Israel in 1956 lacked clear superiority and won only with two European powers (PDF p.109-110). The French route is reconstructed: the NEACC, Dulles’s conditions, the Egyptian-Czech arms treaty of September 27, 1955, Peres’s clandestine procurement expertise and his negotiations, to the exclusion of the Foreign Ministry, with Bourgès-Maunoury over Algeria and the FLN; on April 10, 1956 procurement moved to the Ministry of Defense, Sharett was shut out and then disempowered, and on June 23-24, 1956 at Vermars France sanctioned 200 AMX tanks and 72 Mystère IV jets valued at eighty million US dollars in return for intelligence and secret operations — an alliance in exchange for war (PDF p.111-113). The “Challe Scenario” of October 14, 1956, Eden’s assent, Ben-Gurion’s reluctant consent at Sèvres (October 22-24) to a subordinated role he insisted on calling the “British plan”, and Dayan’s eight-point plan fixing the attack for Monday, October 29, 1956, 7 p.m., follow (PDF p.114-115). Ben-Gurion’s “fantastic plan” (via Shlaim) — Jordan divided, the West Bank attached to Israel as a semi-autonomous region, expansion to the Litani, Israeli control of the Straits of Tiran, Nasser eliminated for a pro-Western regime — projects Israel’s enemy image onto the West and shows, Amar-Dahl argues, fear of isolation and condescension toward the region’s inhabitants; Peres’s Sèvres account frames the choice as good against evil, Nasser as a Hitler-like dictator (PDF p.116-117).

4 — Of War and Nuclear Weapons; The Policy of Opacity; The Vanunu Affair (PDF p.118-136 / printed p.109-127)

Israel used the French alliance to begin developing nuclear weapons, Peres as Director-General the driving power behind French start-up support; on Avner Cohen’s account the project’s fathers were Bergman, Ben-Gurion and Peres. Whether France bought Israeli cooperation with a reactor is debated: Cohen calls the cooperation an “additional incentive” not the price, Shlaim likewise denies a direct link while leaving out Peres’s memoir remark — “Before the final signing, I asked Ben-Gurion for a brief adjournment, during which I met Mollet and Bourges-Maunoury alone. It was here that I finalized with these two leaders an agreement for the building of a nuclear reactor at Dimona” — and Bar-Zohar supports the bought-with-the-reactor hypothesis (PDF p.118-120). Three treaties by the end of 1957 are given: December 12, 1956 (a forty — by other sources twenty-five — megawatt reactor and 385 tons of natural uranium), August 23, 1957 (cooperation in research and production of nuclear weapons), and October 1957 (construction and plutonium production), paving the path to Dimona (PDF p.120). Ben-Gurion decided from a unique charismatic position, off the political agenda and under military censorship; the 1962 debate between Cohen’s “nuclear technology school” (Peres, Dayan) and the “conventionalists” (Alon, Galili of Ahdut Haavoda) ended with both prevailing by worst-case invocation and massive investment in both directions; Peres’s 1965 stages — retaliation, deterrent, disarmament — and his 1962 “Lessons for Security Policy” make peace a side effect of security and armament a matter of pessimistic assessment immune to temporary political improvement (PDF p.121-124). The “Policy of Opacity” — neither confirming nor denying, the standard reply “Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East” — is, on Avner Cohen’s The Last Taboo (2005), an extreme tension with democracy, sustained by taboo, censorship and strategy; its pre-state roots, Ben-Gurion’s December 21, 1960 peaceful-purposes declaration accepted without debate, the secret Knesset commission of late 1962, and the silencing of Eliezer Livneh’s group and the Committee for the Nuclear Disarmament of the Middle East — Leibowitz’s “state within the state” — are traced (PDF p.125-129). The Vanunu Affair: Peres in 1967 and Dayan in 1973 both contemplated using the deterrent in an emergency; on October 5, 1986 the Sunday Times published Vanunu’s revelations — Israel sixth among nuclear powers, one hundred to two hundred weapons produced at Dimona; Peres with Shamir and Rabin decided on September 21, 1986 to abduct Vanunu, who was lured to Rome, tried in camera, and on March 24, 1988 sentenced to eighteen years, much of it in solitary confinement, released April 21, 2004 with movement still restricted; Peres confirmed the arrest only on November 16, 1986, briefed the Editors’ Committee to suppress local reporting for forty-eight hours, and testified in January 1988 that the publications had harmed “Israel’s security” without giving reasons — the affair is read as the “not being allowed to speak” principle of the Israeli order at work (PDF p.130-136).

4 — Conventional War and the Zionist Project: Lebanon 1982 (PDF p.137-140 / printed p.128-131)

Conventional war remained a reality despite nuclear deterrence — the part lists wars of conquest (1956, 1967), the Yom Kippur War, the Wars of Attrition, the clashes over the territories and the Intifadas, and the 1991 Gulf War — and the invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982, “Peace for Galilee”, is presented as the first war “freely chosen” by the leadership. On Black and Morris’s account it resulted from the PLO’s shift to Beirut and South Lebanon after “Black September” 1970 and from the Lebanese Civil War and the Israeli-Falangist alliance, Israel having supported the Christians since the 1950s under the Periphery Doctrine as a “natural alliance” (PDF p.137-138). Operation Litani (March 15, 1978, seven thousand men, four Israeli-dominated enclaves under Haddad’s Free Lebanese Army) precedes the 1982 plan: Sharon, the main driving force since August 1981, expanded “Operation Pinetree” into “Operation Big Pines” — advancing north of Beirut and bringing the PLO back to Jordan to overthrow the Hashemites and establish a Palestinian state there — which Begin presented to the cabinet on May 10, 1982 in a shortened version as a “limited operation”; the shooting of Ambassador Shlomo Argov in London supplied the occasion, the stated goal was a forty-kilometer zone, and Arafat and approximately eleven thousand PLO combatants were evacuated to Tunisia by August 1982 (PDF p.138-139). Israel helped Bachir Gemayel win the presidency — elected August 23, 1982 with fifty-seven of sixty-two votes cast, assassinated September 14 — and after his assassination Sharon ordered the advance into West Beirut while the Phalangists entered Sabra and Shatila to “purge them of hidden terrorists”: from September 16 to 18, 1982 they massacred Palestinians in plain sight of the Israeli army, between seven hundred and eight hundred killed by Israeli reports, more than two thousand by Palestinian estimates (PDF p.139-140). The closing section, “War Policy: A Social Political Consensus”, begins: in 1982 for the first time a right-wing government chose war, and Peres as Labor opposition leader defended the invasion on June 8, 1982 against Hadash’s no-confidence vote, securing Begin’s majority — against the Zionist Left historiography that casts him as one of the invasion’s fiercest opponents (PDF p.140; section continues in part 4).

4 — War Policy: A Social Political Consensus, continued (PDF p.141-144 / printed p.132-135)

Peres’s 1982 press statements seemed irresolute and scattered — he supported the war de facto but would not be frank about it; in his July 30, 1982 article the IDF is rendering Lebanon, and even Beirut’s Palestinians, a service by expelling the PLO, and the election of a new Lebanese president is a war aim to be achieved “without foreign intervention”, as in 1956 (removing Egypt’s president) and his 1963 suggestion that Israel “appoint an Israeli Arab in his stead” in Jordan (PDF p.141-142). Sharon’s actual aim — expelling the PLO leadership into Jordan to establish a state there, “Jordan is Palestine” on the Right — is not directly linked by Peres to the war; like Sharon he disapproved of Resolutions 242 and 338, and his actual goal is clear: no Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories (PDF p.143-144). Peres as prime minister in early 1985 pushed through only a partial withdrawal, keeping a “narrow security zone” in South Lebanon under the IDF with Antoine Lahad’s South Lebanon army — de facto a continuation of the war — in which Hezbollah, founded in the wake of the invasion and supported by Iran, fought an eighteen-year guerrilla war until Barak’s full withdrawal in 2000 (PDF p.144).

4 — The Escalation Potential of the “Security Zone” in South Lebanon (PDF p.144-147 / printed p.135-138)

Peres’s 1984 “Lebanon – A Different Policy” designed the zone as “active defense from outside”: Israeli air force and navy dominance, Haddad’s forces bolstered, South Lebanon as “flexible territory”, and “no real occupation” because the IDF is “a defense force, by no means an occupying army” (PDF p.145). In July 1993, after Hezbollah killed six Israeli soldiers, Rabin’s operation “Payback” (July 25-31, 1993) bombarded South Lebanese villages to drive flight north and pressure Beirut to disarm Hezbollah: approximately 300,000 fled, one hundred and eighteen Lebanese civilians and eight Hezbollah fighters — “more than fifty,” according to Israeli reports — were killed, against two Israeli civilians and one soldier (PDF p.145-146). Peres in April 1996 still defended the zone — “Lebanon is Israel’s largest field for experimentation in the fight against terrorism” — in a circle Amar-Dahl calls the logic of perpetual warfare: the occupation is the reason for Hezbollah’s guerrilla war, whose existence in turn requires the occupation; it took the civilian “Four Mothers Movement” to prompt the 2000 retreat, which the army still holds to have tarnished Israel’s determent power [as printed] (PDF p.146-147).

4 — Security and the Policy of Targeted Killings; The Military Operation Grapes of Wrath (PDF p.147-151 / printed p.138-142)

On January 6, 1996 the Shin Bet killed Yahya Ayyash in Gaza on Peres’s orders; Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide attacks are presented as a response to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 Hebron massacre of twenty-nine Palestinians, itself directed against the peace talks, and Shlaim ascribes the Ayyash killing to Carmi Gilon’s wish for a “spectacular gesture” and, for Peres, to “tough justice” and acting “in the service of the morality of the nation and of the security forces”, where Peres himself called it a preemptive strike — “It wasn’t a matter of revenge” (PDF p.147-148). Hamas’s February-March 1996 revenge attacks killed sixty Israelis; Peres terminated talks with the Palestinian Authority and closed the borders (PDF p.147-148). Grapes of Wrath (April 11-27, 1996) followed: against Shlaim’s reading of Lebanon as a “tempting retaliation target” before the elections, the army leadership and Foreign Minister Barak pushed air raids to force South Lebanon’s civilian majority to flee north — approximately 400,000 fled — while Peres withheld the operation’s specific political goals “in order to avoid high, unattainable aspirations”; it ended under American pressure without result, and Labor lost the elections, not least over lost Israeli Palestinian votes (PDF p.149-151). Later encounters are noted in passing: the 2006 Lebanon operation, Barak sending troops into Hamas-controlled Gaza in late 2008, and the 2012 and 2014 Gaza clashes under Likud with the Zionist Left’s unshakable consent (PDF p.151).

4 — Conclusion: Of War and Jewish Statehood (PDF p.151-156 / printed p.142-147)

“The Jewish state was born out of war”: war has a positive connotation because it secures Jewish statehood — 1948 brought Zionism closer to its goals than Resolution 181 allowed, 1956 built deterrence, 1967 expanded territory — yet because Israel settled no territory question in 1949 and was intent on expansion, all its wars, of conquest, attrition and defence alike, were ultimately fought over land, with defence, security and national-state existence equated in the “Security Code” and “Ein-Breira” (no choice) (PDF p.151-152). The doctrine of determent [as printed throughout] — “activistic defense”, “preemptive war”, “retaliation” — entails perpetual armament and ceaseless demonstration of power, legitimises non-conventional weapons and disproportionate operations, and equates deterrence with regional hegemony and exclusive nuclear possession, with the 1981 Iraq and 2007 Syria reactor strikes and prevention of a nuclear Iran as integral parts (PDF p.153-154). The consensus rests on the depoliticization of security from above: security decisions are made by the executive, the security cabinet and the apparatuses, excluding society and the Knesset — a culture laid down by Ben-Gurion’s small Ministry of Defense circle, exemplified in 1956 and 1967, reinforced by Peres in 1982 and in the nuclear programme’s opacity, and enforced by censorship, emergency laws and denial (PDF p.154-156).

5 Jewish Statehood and Regional Peace — opening; Zionist Left: The Language of Peace (PDF p.157-163 / printed p.148-154)

Chapter 5 opens on Peres’s late-1990s division of his fifty years between defence and peace — crossing to peace “was like leaving the real world in exchange for an unreal one” — with peace strictly a consequence of security, national-state existence preceding reconciliation, and Peres’s “Peace is like a dream” (PDF p.157). Peres’s record is sketched: the 1985 Lebanon partial withdrawal, the blocked 1987 London Document with King Hussein, the 1990 attempt to dissolve the grand coalition, and the 1992 “peace government” that set Oslo in motion (PDF p.157-158). Four scholarly catchphrases structure the section: Zuckermann’s “Peace Ideology” and “psycho-collective fear of peace” — “peace is on everyone’s lips, but nobody has ever really put it to the test” — with the “security question” as “cement for the conflict-laden society” (PDF p.159-160); Lev Grinberg’s “Security Myth”, under which the army is stylised as a “defensive army” and the conflict traced to the “new Goyim” (PDF p.160-161); Grinberg’s myth of “peace and security” and “Imagined Peace”, in which Oslo’s core questions are postponed for trust-building while occupation and settlement expansion continue unmodified (PDF p.161-162); and Raz-Krakotzkin’s “principle of separation” across the whole political spectrum, visible in the Oslo-era reinforcement of the passport system introduced in 1991, which ended the relative freedom of movement held under Dayan’s “economic integration” (PDF p.162-163).

5 — The Young Israel: Jewish Statehood without Peace (PDF p.163-172 / printed p.154-163)

After 1948 the leadership excluded any compromise on the two problems peace required settling — state borders and Palestinian refugees; Ben-Gurion opposed talks with Faruq (September 1948) and Zaim (spring 1949): “I am prepared to get up in the middle of the night in order to sign a peace agreement – but I am not in a hurry and I can wait ten [years]” (PDF p.163-164). Sharett’s dialogue with Nasser, taken up in early 1954, was ended by the February 28, 1955 “Black Arrow” retaliation operation, which also prompted Nasser’s Fedayeen recruitment and the September 1955 Egyptian-Soviet arms treaty (PDF p.164-165). The Alpha Plan of February 1955 — among other points two thirds of the Negev for an Egypt-Jordan land bridge, limited refugee return and compensation, and a Western security guarantee — was categorically refused by Israel; the Johnston Plan for Jordan Basin water, which Sharett conducted himself and made palatable to the cabinet, was in the end rejected by the Arab heads of state (PDF p.165-166). Sharett’s 1957 contrast of the security establishment’s stance — the language of power is the only thing the Arabs understand — with his own, “we have to be incessantly aspiring to peace”, frames Peres’s 1955 essay “Reconciliation Does Not Mean Security”: security lies in “our willingness and ability to defend what we have achieved with much blood”, the Arab side alone is responsible for the tension factors, compromise would endanger the achievements of 1948, UN observers are a burden, and “The reinforcement of our [military] power is an absolute, by no means relative matter” (PDF p.167-171). Peres’s 1965 “Disarmament and Peace” and his 1970 text still presuppose the longing for peace while holding it unrealizable for want of a dialogue partner — for Nasser “it is not territory, but prestige” — a “discourse of separated contemplation” shifting the debate from territory to the partner question, which became a standard formula (PDF p.171-172).

5 — Peace Treaty with Egypt 1978–1979: Peace Work of the Zionist Right (PDF p.172-175 / printed p.163-166)

Sinai was the price of the first peace treaty with an Arab state, concluded by the Right: Begin, proponent of the “promised land” myth, took up talks with Sadat, who visited Jerusalem on November 19, 1977; the Camp David summit (September 5–17, 1978) produced a Framework providing “a process for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza” and a settlement recognising “the legitimate right of the Palestinian peoples and their just requirements”, and, as a second step, an Egypt-Israel treaty with withdrawal from Sinai, demilitarization, UN troops and free navigation (PDF p.172-173). Begin prevailed in concluding a separate peace and the Palestinian question remained left out; the Knesset ratified the treaty on March 22, 1979 by ninety-five yeas to eighteen nays, it was signed on March 26, 1979, and Egypt was excluded from the Arab League (PDF p.174). Dayan and Weizmann resigned when Begin would not pursue autonomy negotiations; in giving up Sinai Begin reached his limits of compromise, and after the failed 1982 Lebanon attempt he resigned by September 1983 — having gone down in history as the first Israeli politician to conclude a realised peace based on abandoning territory, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate with Sadat (PDF p.174-175).

5 — The Oslo Peace Process 1993–1996: Peace Work of the Zionist Left (PDF p.175-181 / printed p.166-172)

The 1990s are often called an “optimistic peace decade”: Madrid (1991), the Oslo breakthrough (1993), peace with Jordan (1994), and promising Syrian-Israeli progress in 1995 set back by Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995 (PDF p.175-176). The decisive preliminary question — whether autonomy applies only to the people or also to the land — was answered in Begin’s plan by leaving sovereignty open and maintaining the occupation status quo; Right and Left in the 1980s grand coalition both massively supported Jewish colonialization [as printed] under, respectively, the “myth of the promised land” and the “security myth”, from which the Left cultivated the “myth of peace and security” and became “the peace camp” (PDF p.176-177). Begin’s full-territory-for-peace conclusion ran counter to that myth’s “trump card”, and Oslo’s tactics were the “small steps” of that myth, goals unvoiced (PDF p.177). The 1987 London Document is given in full: an international conference under UN auspices on Resolutions 242 and 338, bilateral groups, no imposed solution or veto, the Palestinian question treated only in a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, the Palestinian Option categorically excluded and the UN barred from influencing content (PDF p.177-178). After the fruitless Washington talks, Rabin, Peres and Yossi Beilin made the historic decision to negotiate directly with the PLO; Oslo I (September 13, 1993) is given in its provisions — mutual recognition, a Palestinian Authority in free elections, permanent-status negotiations on Resolutions 242 and 338 with borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and security deferred, Gaza-Jericho withdrawal, and legislative-council elections within nine months — and Oslo II (September 28, 1995) divided the West Bank into categories A (four percent), B (twenty-five percent) and C, with Israel keeping more than thirty-five percent of Gaza, passing the Knesset sixty-one to fifty-nine on October 5, 1995 (PDF p.179-180). Grinberg’s three processes behind Oslo are the military’s, the economic elite’s and the Labor Party’s democratization under “Change in National Priorities” (PDF p.180-181).

5 — The Oslo Peace Process: The Palestinian Option (PDF p.182-184 / printed p.173-175)

Kimmerling is quoted at length: an “all-embracing militaristic metacultural code” blurs peace and war, the Egypt agreement was made to increase control over “Judea and Samaria” and was immediately followed by the 1982 Lebanon war, and the Oslo Accords were agreed “primarily in order to shed responsibility for densely Arab-populated areas by establishing indirect control using Arafat’s Palestinian Authority as subcontractor, but without giving up ‘overall security responsibility’ for any part of Eretz Israel” (PDF p.182). Recognition of the PLO was a watershed — until 1993 the PLO was in Israel’s eyes a terrorist organization, and a 1985 Knesset law prohibiting talks with terrorist-organization representatives was annulled only in 1993; on Bar-Zohar’s account Peres negotiated only with a PLO weakened in 1991 by the Second Gulf War (PDF p.182-183). Rabin and Peres — Nobel laureates of 1994 with Arafat, for accepting the PLO under Arafat as a dialogue partner (PDF p.183) — and Beilin were themselves no less skeptical than their Right rivals of the Palestinian Option; the “small steps” concept, Israel’s objection to arbitrators and the deferral of core questions left outcomes to the power relations, producing the hybrid Oslo years in which occupation practices continued alongside negotiations — “Oslo as continuation of occupation by peaceful means” — with settlement projects kept up and expanded, and settler numbers, on Hass’s figures, doubling from 91,400 (1991) to 198,300 (2000) excluding East Jerusalem, and 141,000 (1992) to 173,000 (2000) in East Jerusalem (PDF p.183-184).

5 — The Oslo Peace Process: The Palestinian Option, continued; The Zionist Left Trapped between Eretz Israel, Security and Peace (PDF p.185-187 / printed p.176-178)

The open situation Oslo created cut both ways: the Zionist Right fought a process supposedly heading towards a Palestinian state while settlement policy was still actively pursued, and itself opposed a Palestinian pseudo-state controlled by Israel for fear negotiations might yield up territories in Eretz Israel; the Zionist Left leadership sought a middle ground — negotiations and reconciliation in order that settlement and security may be further ensured — with the fight against Hamas and Islamic Jihad as stated motivation and the Palestinian Authority as auxiliary power relieving the Israeli army. For the Israeli government a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was “in no way a done deal” in 1993–1996, and Peres, held responsible for a process associated exclusively with that goal, did not stand behind this aim (PDF p.185). The new section stages the March 25, 1994 Maariv talk between Peres and Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Leibowitz — “we have not retreated even by a centimeter”, and “two hundred and sixty children, the oldest ones fifteen, were killed by Israeli soldiers. That is the meaning of occupation policy” — against Peres’s caution, majority-winning and terror-fighting, his refusal to commit to a permanent solution, his holding that the 1967 borders were no basis for one, and his preferred confederation concept; Leibowitz’s verdict: “This is sick hypocrisy” (PDF p.185-186). Amar-Dahl reads the hypocrisy as logical: a Palestinian state had been taboo since 1948 and would dissolve the military dominance even the peace government could not relinquish, so the three maxims of security, Eretz Israel and peace proved mutually irreconcilable, and peace had to remain an unfulfilled dream under the two founding myths; the difference between the camps is that the Right will not pay peace’s territorial and identity-political price, while the Left’s Peace Ideology depoliticizes peace — it is made to hinge solely on Arab recognition of Israel, leaving only hope, imagined peace and military anti-terrorism (PDF p.187).

5 — Exit of the Zionist Left (PDF p.188-194 / printed p.179-185)

Peres’s rejection of the Palestinian Option became obvious once he led the state, between Rabin’s murder on November 4, 1995 and Labor’s voting out in late May 1996. In his October 1995 Knesset assessment of Oslo II — “The permanent solution will not result in a Palestinian state, but rather will be based on new ideas”, the “new ideas” never elaborated, the autonomy’s legal status never stated — his stated objective was avoiding a bi-national state: “Israel cannot and will not be an apartheid state”; the Israeli army was the only one between Jordan and the Mediterranean, and the Palestinian Authority’s clear advance task was to fight Palestinian terrorism (PDF p.188-189). As acting prime minister he took Rabin’s double position but gave the Foreign Ministry to Ehud Barak, not Yossi Beilin; announced a regional peace turning first to Syria, since “it is not pressing for now with the Palestinians” — the Syrian-Israeli negotiations in Maryland in January 1996 soon dead-ended on the territorial question; courted the national-religious Mafdal with a promise not to vacate any settlements, on Grinberg’s account construing Rabin’s murder and the process itself as a danger to the “unity of Israeli-Jewish society”, and failed to win it — Jacob Jona’s “hysteric alliance” (PDF p.189-190). Oslo II was mostly realized by December 1995: troops withdrawn from Palestinian cities, Regions A and B — here twenty-seven percent — transferred, Region C (seventy-three percent) remaining under Israeli dominance, settlements staying with the PA’s consent, Arafat neutralizing the Islamic resistance, moderate settlers’ consent bought with bypass roads and settlement expansion; Palestinian elections followed in January 1996 (PDF p.190). On the wall, Peres held to “soft borders”, halted the construction preparations in November 1995 and proposed “industrial parks” for Palestinian employment and “good neighborly relations”, against Rabin’s turn to re-erected borders and, on Grinberg’s account, a resolved wall along the 1967 Green Line — Amar-Dahl questions how pronounced the business-elite/security-elite dichotomy was, since business dominance over the Palestinian market itself required military control of the whole country (PDF p.190-192). Peres restated his “functional confederation solution” for the West Bank; by the end of 1995 reality increasingly resembled the “old security order”. His two military decisions of early 1996 — ordering Yahya Ayyash’s killing in January, authorizing the Lebanon operation in April — are, on Grinberg’s reading, a failed imitation of Rabin the “man of security”; his depoliticized election campaign covered up the debate with the Oslo opponents, quietly discontinued the Palestinian talks, refused permanent-solution negotiations before the election, and could not take up the secretly negotiated Beilin/Abu-Masen Paper — a demilitarized Palestinian state on ninety-four percent of the West Bank with southern-Gaza compensation, exterritorial Muslim holy sites and a capital outside Israel-determined Jerusalem — which Shlaim says Peres would not endorse because he wanted Palestine-Jordan relations spelled out, regarded the Jerusalem ideas as inadequate, and wanted to retain the Jordan Valley as Israel’s strategic border (PDF p.192-194).

5 — Conclusion: Israel’s Founding Myths and the Question of Palestine (PDF p.194-199 / printed p.185-190)

The 1990s process opened, for the first time, a time window that could have led to a political settlement, made possible by the 1992 changeover of power and a government willing to negotiate; Labor’s 1996 defeat is generally seen as a harsh setback, and Oslo advocates regretted the narrow defeat of the Nobel laureate expected to complete a two-state solution, while opponents blamed Peres and Beilin for the “Oslo catastrophe”. Yet Peres, a diehard security politician representative of the conflict-laden order, was simply not the right man: he advanced the process only very hesitantly when conditions were most favourable and in the end quietly discontinued it, though after Rabin’s assassination he held unparalleled power — as prime minister and minister of defense and “tribal elder”, with the Left and the “broad center” behind him, the right-wing opposition weakened, a recognized PLO dialogue partner, an interim agreement partially implemented, and a permanent solution already formulated in the Beilin/Abu-Masen document that the Palestinian leadership would have welcomed. Uri Avnery in late November 1995: “There are such unique fate-changing moments in history,” “when all becomes possible that cannot be realized either shortly before or shortly after” — Peres did not seize it, because even in the mid-1990s he did not see the two-state concept as viable in Zionist Israel’s interests: giving up claims to parts of Eretz Israel would raise the question of Palestine ideologically as well as politically, and for Peres and Zionist Israel Eretz Israel, the “land of the forefathers” and “promised land”, is not up for political debate; immigration, settlement and security were his life’s work, and since the land is settled by another collective the dominant discourse was oriented toward security, not peace — Peres, shortly before the Second Intifada: “For me, crossing over from the domain of defense to the domain of peace was like leaving the real world in exchange for an unreal one” (PDF p.194-196). The bottom line: the political order rests on two founding myths — the myth of Eretz Israel as the land of the Jewish people, and the safety myth [the Conclusion’s term, beside “security myth” earlier]. The first means Israel cannot acknowledge Palestinian self-determination, allow a Palestinian state in any part of the country, or naturalize all Palestinians without revising its raison d’état; since it neither can/wants to split the land nor sees a bi-national state as a real option, the Palestinians remain an “out-group”, the displaced enemies — and the neighbouring Arab states, involved since 1948, are enemies too (PDF p.196). The safety myth, sprung from the history of Jewish suffering, assumes Jewish-Goyim hostility can never be fully resolved and invincible military power essential, with “the Arabs” as the “great opponent” from 1948; security became the order’s central pillar and a social code, the security forces one of the most powerful state elites, and peace came to be seen as the product of favourable power relations, deemed possible only if military control over Eretz Israel and its “Arabs” is maintained — the military administration before 1967 and the occupation policy afterwards (PDF p.196-197). Alongside it the Peace Ideology points to the “peace-seeking” Israel against its “unruly” Arab environment, claims there is “no dialogue partner”, reinforces the peaceful, just self-image that powers an order based on violence, and veils interests connected to Jewish statehood, blocking out that Zionism was accomplished sword-in-hand; both codes depoliticize the conflict — sacralization kept the “Holy Land” off the negotiating table and made the “Judaization of the country” possible, while the safety myth ideologized and depoliticized security, retaining it as prime principle despite a security policy repeatedly proven counterproductive — and depoliticized conflict entails depoliticized peace, in which peace in the peace camp itself becomes separation from “the others”; with the order intact in the 1990s, real peace could not prevail and had to be “imagined” (PDF p.197-198). Blocking out its own history is the reaction to the unsolvable key questions — the fought-over state territory and the Palestinians’ status remain Zionist Israel’s Achilles’ heel, and every concession is feared as the seed of the whole project’s failure, the project having been advanced “at the expense of the Arabs” from its inception; the result is existential angst and isolation. Since the Second Intifada’s outbreak in October 2000, Israel has entered a highly precarious phase: history is no longer on its side, demography defies the Eretz Israel myth, continuing war demoralizes civil society and weakens the safety myth, military strength cannot resolve the conflict, and although international pressure grows daily Israel clings to its founding myths and its strategy of waiting things out, entrenching itself and fighting — “the Middle East conflict remains the inescapable price Israel has to pay for Jewish national statehood – or at least that is what she has been conditioned to believe” (PDF p.198-199).

Bibliography and Index of Persons (PDF p.200-209 / printed p.191-199)

The Bibliography (PDF p.200-205) lists the work’s sources alphabetically, Amar-Dahl’s own three earlier books first, and closes with ten Internet sources, among them the Britannica and Wikipedia Camp David Accords pages cited in Chapter 5’s footnotes and the MFA Declaration of Independence page. The Index of Persons (PDF p.206-208) gives printed-page locators for every person named, Shimon Peres’s list the longest, ending at printed p.187. PDF p.209 is blank in the text copy.

Key passages

• “Israel is a product of Zionism.” (Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, PDF p.10 / printed p.1)
• “critical without being accusing, differentiated without seeking to expose, and sober without being detached” (PDF p.12 / printed p.3)
• “‘negation of exile’ refers to the consciousness that deems the present Jewish settlement in, and sovereignty over, Palestine as the ‘return’ of the Jews to the land believed to be their home, and imagined, prior to its ‘redemption,’ as empty.” (Raz-Krakotzkin, quoted PDF p.14 / printed p.5)
• “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” (Herzl, quoted PDF p.29 / printed p.20)
• “have no right to keep the Jews from re-shaping Eretz Israel” (Katznelson, quoted PDF p.34 / printed p.25)
• “Its prime feature is the totality of Arab hostility.” (Peres, quoted PDF p.47 / printed p.38)
• “We are looking to draw nearer to an environment that will cooperate with us, and not one that is capable of exterminating us.” (Peres 1958, quoted PDF p.55 / printed p.46)
• “An Ethnocracy is a non-democratic regime which attempts to extend or preserve disproportional ethnic control over a contested multi-ethnic territory.” (Yiftachel, quoted PDF p.66 / printed p.57)
• “Our state is the most dynamic in the world and is being reshaped daily.” (Ben-Gurion, quoted PDF p.73 / printed p.64)
• “fighting terrorism is essentially impossible without secrecy” (Peres, quoted PDF p.93 / printed p.84)
• “In the first fifty years Israel fought for its physical existence, in the next fifty years it will be fighting for its moral identity.” (Peres 2000, quoted PDF p.97 / printed p.88)
• “facts are a subjective matter” (Peres to Barnea, PDF p.98 / printed p.89)
• “For eight years they have been dwelling in refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes we are turning their land and the villages where they and their forefathers dwelt into our home.” (Dayan, Rotberg eulogy, quoted PDF p.104 / printed p.95)
• “Before the final signing, I asked Ben-Gurion for a brief adjournment, during which I met Mollet and Bourges-Maunoury alone. It was here that I finalized with these two leaders an agreement for the building of a nuclear reactor at Dimona, in southern Israel, and the supply of natural uranium to fuel it.” (Peres 1995, quoted PDF p.119 / printed p.110)
• “Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.” (standard reply, PDF p.125 / printed p.116)
• “The Jewish state was born out of war.” (PDF p.152 / printed p.143)
• “Israel’s security neither depends on reconciliation with the [Western] world nor on reconciliation with the Arabs. Rather, our security lies in our willingness and ability to defend what we have achieved with much blood.” (Peres, September 29, 1955, quoted PDF p.168 / printed p.159)
• “peace is on everyone’s lips, but nobody has ever really put it to the test” (Zuckermann, quoted PDF p.159 / printed p.150)
• “Oslo as continuation of occupation by peaceful means” (a leftist Oslo critic, quoted PDF p.184 / printed p.175)
• “Even if Vanunu’s information about nuclear weapons is incorrect, Israel should still prosecute him because he does not have the right to talk about such matters. He has betrayed state secrets.” (Peres, quoted PDF p.132 / printed p.123)
• “two hundred and sixty children, the oldest ones fifteen, were killed by Israeli soldiers. That is the meaning of occupation policy.” (Leibowitz to Peres, March 25, 1994, quoted PDF p.186 / printed p.177)
• “This is sick hypocrisy.” (Leibowitz to Peres, quoted PDF p.186 / printed p.177)
• “Israel cannot and will not be an apartheid state.” (Peres to the Knesset, October 1995, quoted PDF p.188 / printed p.179)
• “For me, crossing over from the domain of defense to the domain of peace was like leaving the real world in exchange for an unreal one.” (Peres 1999: 61, quoted PDF p.196 / printed p.187)
• “at the expense of the Arabs” (PDF p.199 / printed p.190)

Evidence the work relies on

The work’s evidence, in book order:

• Zionist and Israeli texts quoted or cited: Herzl, The Jewish State (1896) and Altneuland (1902); Peres and Littell (1998), Peres, The Imaginary Voyage (2000), David’s Sling (1970) and Peres (1965, 1978); Katznelson via Shapira (1980/1983) and Gorny (1986); Leibowitz (1954/1997); Neturei Karta statement (nkusa.org).
• Scholarship cited: Dubnow (1931/2003), Raz-Krakotzkin (2000, 2005), Avineri (1999), Brubaker (2002), Wehler (2007), Gellner, Hobsbawm, Smith, Zuckermann (2002), Arendt (1945/1970), Said (1978/2009) and Said and Barsamian (2003/2006), Gorny (1986), Wasserstein (2003) for land and population figures, Ozacky-Lazar (1998), Hofnung (1996), Morris (1996), Azoulay and Ophir (2008), Krispin (2002).
• Laws and resolutions as presented: Law of Return (1950), Law of Fallow Land (1948), Absentees Property Law (1950), Land Acquisitions Law (1953), British Defence Regulations (1945), UN Resolution 181 (1947).
• For the continuation of Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 through the Shin Bet Affair: the Declaration of Independence (1948) via the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Smooha (1996, 2002), Yiftachel (1999, 2006), Peled (2007), Kimmerling (1993, 1994), Ophir (2001), Bechor (1996) on the constitution debate; Janowitz, Horowitz and Lissak, Ben-Eliezer on the military; Kafkafi (1998), Arieli (1965), Hasin and Horowitz (1961), Eshed, Black and Morris (1994) on the Lavon Affair; Gutman (1995), Black and Morris (1994), Betelheim (1986), Negbi (1987) and Haaretz (May 30, 1986) on the Shin Bet Affair; the citizenship law (1952) and the 1985 Basic Law amendment as presented by Yiftachel.
• For the conclusion of Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 through the opening of the Lebanon 1982 account: Sprinzak (1993) on elite illegalism; Schmidt (2000) for Peres 2000; Peres (1995) memoirs and Barnea (Haaretz, June 25, 2004); Ben-Eliezer (1998) on praetorianism; Shapira (1992), Biale (1986), Fackenheim, Schweid on violence; Kimmerling (1993A) on militarism and the Dayan eulogy via Zertal (2005); Pedezur (2003), Golani (1998, 2002), Morris (1996, 2000), Tal (2001), Bar-On (1992), Kafkafi (1994), Bar-Zohar (2006, 2007) and Shlaim (2000, 2001) on 1956 and Sèvres; Avner Cohen (2000, 2005), Evron (1987), Yoel Cohen (1995), Feldmann (1998), Shapiro (1998) and Orr (1998) on Dimona, opacity and Vanunu; Black and Morris (1991, 1994) and Landau (2015) on Lebanon 1982.
• For the rest of Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 through the Palestinian Option: Peres 1982 newspaper articles (Maariv, Al Hamishmar, Haaretz, Davar, June-September 1982) and his March 4, 1984 Hadashot article and April 3, 1996 Maariv statement; Shlaim (2000) on Lebanon, Payback, Ayyash and Grapes of Wrath; Pedezur (2006), Bar-Josef (2006), Bar-Zohar (2006, 2007), Azoulay-Katz (1996), Ben-Simon (1997), Peres and Littell (1998); Kimmerling (2001) on the Security Code and Oslo; the Chapter 4 conclusion’s reactor-strike dates for Iraq (June 1981) and Syria (September 2007) as presented; Zuckermann (2001, 2003), Grinberg (2007) and Raz-Krakotzkin (1998) on the language of peace; Peres (1955, 1965, 1970, 1995, 1999), Sharett (1957), Shlaim (2000) on Ben-Gurion, the Alpha and Johnston plans; the Camp David Framework as cited to Britannica and Wikipedia URLs (footnotes 48-49); Hass (2006) on the passport system and settler numbers.
• For the rest of Chapter 5, the Conclusion, the Bibliography and the Index of Persons: the author’s own Shimon Peres: Friedenspolitiker und Nationalist (Amar-Dahl 2010), cited at footnotes 69, 70 and 74 for the Oslo endgame; the Peres-Leibowitz talk in Maariv, March 25, 1994; Peres’s Knesset speech in Davar I, October 24, 1995, and his “soft borders” statements in Davar I, November 26, 1995; Haaretz, November 8, 1995, Galili in Haaretz, November 29, 1995, and “The Leader of the New Middle East” in Haaretz, December 5, 1995; Jona in Maariv, December 11, 1995; Grinberg (2007: 133-139, 161-162) and Grinberg (2007A: 38-45) on the wall, the elites and the old security order; Shlaim (2000: 555-556), cited at footnote 91 for the “coup of the century” label and the three reasons Peres would not endorse the Beilin/Abu-Masen Paper — the paper’s terms at PDF p.193 are given in the work’s own summary, with no citation; Bar-Zohar (2006: 666) on the televised debate; Avneri (1995) on the fate-changing moment; Peres (1999: 61) for the defense-to-peace statement. The Bibliography (PDF p.200-205) and Index of Persons (PDF p.206-208) close the book.

Analysis

The work is a critical history of Israeli political culture read through Zionist ideology: it holds the Zionist self-image against demographic/geopolitical reality, attributes enemy images to named texts (especially Peres’s), and separates what each cited author says from Amar-Dahl’s own analysis. In the opening chapters its evidence is primarily textual — extended quotation of Herzl, Katznelson and Peres — supported by secondary historiography (Gorny, Shapira, Raz-Krakotzkin, Zuckermann, Krispin) and Wasserstein’s figures; its limits there are that population and land figures are given from single cited sources without reconciliation, and the 1947 population sentence is ambiguous as printed (see Open questions). The democracy chapter works by holding named models (Smooha, Yiftachel, Kimmerling) against each other and by two case histories reconstructed from secondary accounts (Kafkafi, Arieli, Gutman, Black and Morris); the affairs’ facts are given as those accounts present them, not from primary records reproduced in the work. The war-policy chapter works the same way, holding named historians against each other (Morris, Tal and Golani on 1956; Cohen and Shlaim against Bar-Zohar on the reactor) without resolving their disagreements, and building the opacity and Vanunu sections almost entirely from Avner Cohen and Yoel Cohen; casualty and arsenal figures (Qibya sixty-nine, Dimona one hundred to two hundred weapons, Sabra and Shatila 700-800 against more than 2,000) are given with their rival sources side by side, and the reactor-capacity figure is given in two versions in the same passage (see Open questions). The war chapter closes by generalising its case histories into a doctrine account sourced chiefly to Kimmerling (2001) and the author’s own earlier work (Amar-Dahl 2010, footnote 181), and Chapter 5 works by holding the Zionist Left’s peace vocabulary in four named scholarly terms (Zuckermann, Grinberg, Raz-Krakotzkin) against Peres’s own texts of 1955, 1965 and 1970 quoted at length; the Camp David Framework’s content is cited to Britannica and Wikipedia URLs rather than to the accords’ text (footnotes 48-49), and several casualty and population figures are given with an Israeli-report variant beside them without the variant’s referent always being specified (see Open questions). The Oslo endgame rests heavily on the author’s own earlier monograph (Amar-Dahl 2010, cited at footnotes 69, 70 and 74 for the claims that Peres did not stand behind a Palestinian state) and on contemporary newspaper reporting (Maariv, Davar I, Haaretz, November-December 1995) for Peres’s appointments, coalition overtures and wall decision, with Grinberg (2007, 2007A) supplying the interpretations of the “rightward shift”, the wall and the imitation-of-Rabin reading; for the Beilin/Abu-Masen Paper, the paper’s terms at PDF p.193 are given in the work’s own summary (“In a nutshell …”), with no citation, and Shlaim (2000: 555-556) is cited at footnote 91 for the “coup of the century” label and the three reasons for its rejection. The Conclusion then generalises the whole book into the two-founding-myths thesis, in the Conclusion’s own term “safety myth” where the earlier chapters, following Grinberg, said “security myth” — the terminological shift is the work’s, recorded in Open questions, not resolved here.

People, organizations, places and events

Tamar Amar-Dahl, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Shimon Peres, Berl Katznelson, Max Nordau, David Ben-Gurion, Hannah Arendt, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Shlomo Avineri, Moshe Zuckermann, Yosef Gorny, Anita Shapira, Yitzhak Epstein, Simon Dubnow, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Yonatan Ratosh, Yael Krispin, Abraham Isaac Kook, Gershom Scholem, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, Sammy Smooha, Oren Yiftachel, Baruch Kimmerling, Yoav Peled, Pinchas Lavon, Moshe Dayan, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Yitzhak Zamir, Avraham Shalom, Shin Bet, Shin Bet Affair, Lavon Affair, Neturei Karta, Canaanites, Gush Emunim, World Zionist Organization, First Zionist Congress, Altneuland, Palestine Liberation Organization, Palestinian Authority, June 1967 War, Yom Kippur War, First Intifada, Second Intifada, Oslo Accords, Camp David Accords, UN General Assembly Resolution 181, Law of Return, Absentee Property Law, Avner Cohen, Eliezer Livneh, Mordechai Vanunu, Vanunu Affair, Dimona, Lebanon invasion 1982, Sabra and Shatila massacre, Arik Sharon, Menachem Begin, Rafael Eitan, Phalange, Qibya, Operation Sinai, Lev Grinberg, Hezbollah, Yahya Ayyash, Operation Grapes of Wrath, London Document, Yossi Beilin, Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, Uri Avnery, Mafdal, Beilin/Abu-Masen Paper

Concepts

Zionism, Negation of the Diaspora, Orientalism, Arab Question, Eretz Israel, Judaization, New Jew, Cultural Zionism, Political Zionism, Maximalist Zionism, Present Absentees, Periphery pact, Ethnic Democracy, Ethnocracy, Jewish Code, Nation in Arms, Separation, Civilian Militarism, Policy of Opacity, Elite Illegalism, Deterrence, Security Myth, Peace Ideology, Imagined Peace, Two-state solution

How it relates to other sources

• With The Question of Palestine and Said’s orientalism as used across the wiki: Amar-Dahl, via Raz-Krakotzkin, applies Orientalism specifically to Zionist discourse’s self-definition as Western against an oriental other, including the negation of the “exile Jew”.
• With Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal on Negation of the Diaspora: both treat negation as a core doctrine; Amar-Dahl adds Dubnow, orthodox, Canaanite and religious-Zionist positions side by side.
• With The Jewish State: A Century Later on Ahad Ha’am and the Arab issue: both present Ha’am’s cultural centre and early challenge to avoidance; Amar-Dahl centres the avoidance/separation line through Katznelson to Peres.
• With Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 on labour Zionism and separation: Amar-Dahl’s Gorny-based account of “Fight for Hebrew Work” and market separation agrees in outline; details are held on the respective pages with attribution.
• With The Jewish State: A Century Later on the 1996 election: both works record Peres’s narrow defeat by Netanyahu in May 1996 — Dowty gives the direct-election result precisely (50.5 to 49.5 percent) and reads it as the division between “traditional” and “civic” Israel, while Amar-Dahl attributes the defeat in part to Peres’s own depoliticized campaign, his refusal of permanent-solution negotiations before the election, and the two security-political decisions of early 1996; the two accounts are held side by side on the Benjamin Netanyahu and Oslo Accords pages.

Open questions

• PDF p.40 / printed p.31 gives the Jewish share in 1947 as a third of the total population “amounting to about two million people” — as printed this can read as the total population or the Jewish population; the work does not clarify in this part, and the figure is recorded as printed without resolution.

• PDF p.40 dates the British mandatory period “(1917–1947)” as printed; other works in the wiki give differing Mandate datings — held side by side, not resolved here.

• Spelling as printed: “Weizmann-Feisal Agreement” (PDF p.48), “Am levadad Ischkun” (PDF p.47), “premoderns” for the nationalism school (PDF p.18), “Defence Regulations Emergency” (PDF p.43) — recorded as printed in the reading notes.

• Whether the 6% land figure (Wasserstein 2003: 45, PDF p.40) and the 78% seizure figure refer to the same land categories is not specified in this part.

• PDF p.55 / printed p.46 dates the founding of the Palestinian organization “Fatah” to 1964 “with Nasser’s help”, as printed; other works in the wiki date Fatah’s founding differently and the PLO’s to 1964 — held side by side, not resolved here.

• PDF p.77 / printed p.68 heads the Lavon Affair section “1954–1964” while the text gives its endpoint as the Mapai split of 1965 (PDF p.76, 78, 84) — both datings recorded as printed.

• PDF p.86 / printed p.77 says the Shin Bet sequence “all began in April 1987, when details of the Nafsu Affair surfaced”, in a section on an affair of 1984–1986 — the chronology is recorded as printed.

• PDF p.88 / printed p.79 states that in the Bus Line 300 rescue “one female passenger and several members of the security force were killed”, as printed; the passage gives no names or further figures, and the claim is held as the work presents it.

• PDF p.86 names the American spy “John Pollard” (1954–), as printed; other sources in the wiki use Jonathan Pollard — spelling recorded as printed.

• “ethic group” for ethnic group is printed repeatedly in Chapter 3 (e.g. PDF p.64, 66, 68, 69), and “spacial expansion” (PDF p.57), “advocat” for advocated (PDF p.70, 72) and “Ginossar” for Genossar (PDF p.91) are recorded as printed in the reading notes.

• PDF p.120 / printed p.111 gives the December 12, 1956 treaty reactor as “forty – according to other sources only twenty-five – megawatt” — both values recorded as printed, not resolved.

• PDF p.130 / printed p.121 cites Segev 2005 at pages “347–345”, a reversed range as printed.

• PDF p.101 / printed p.92 spells the philosopher “Emil L. Facken heim” in the running text against “Fackenheim” in its own footnote and later pages — recorded as printed.

• PDF p.104-105 / printed p.95-96 spells the fallen soldier “Ro’i Rotberg” in the narrative and “Ro’i Rothberg” inside the eulogy as quoted from Dayan via Zertal — both spellings recorded as printed.

• PDF p.111 / printed p.102 dates the Fourth Republic “(1944–1958)” as printed.

• PDF p.112 / printed p.103 calls Ben-Gurion and Sharett “The two heads of these ministries” — the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Defense, in the order named in the preceding sentence — without assigning each name to a ministry in that sentence; the work itself identifies Ben-Gurion as “Prime Minister and Minister of Defense David Ben-Gurion” (PDF p.106 / printed p.97). Both passages are recorded as printed; the p.112 passage does not clarify the assignment further.

• PDF p.113 / printed p.104 names the June 1956 conference site “Vermars” as printed; the 1961 source in the wiki gives “Vermars” as well in its appendix on the same meeting — held as printed in both.

• PDF p.114 / printed p.105 describes the Tripartite Declaration of May 1950 as between “France, Great Britain and Egypt” as printed.

• PDF p.128 / printed p.119 spells “Efreim Orbach” as printed.

• PDF p.139 / printed p.130 cites “Benziman 256” with no year, as printed.

• PDF p.140 / printed p.131 locates Sabra and Shatila “in South Beirut” as printed.

• PDF p.146 / printed p.137 gives the July 1993 “Payback” toll as one hundred and eighteen Lebanese civilians and eight Hezbollah fighters killed, with an Israeli-report variant of “more than fifty” set between dashes in the same sentence — which of the two figures the Israeli-report variant replaces is not specified as printed; both forms recorded.

• Footnote 175 at PDF p.150 / printed p.141 dates the call for northern inhabitants to seek shelter in bunkers to “June 8, 1996”, “just a few days before the fighting began”, with a Haaretz citation of June 9, 1996, while the operation it introduces ran April 11-27, 1996 — recorded as printed.

• PDF p.164 / printed p.155 dates Sharett’s foreign-ministry term “(1949–1956)” and his premiership “December 1953 to August 1955”, as printed.

• PDF p.179 / printed p.170 states the Oslo I permanent-regulation negotiations “were to be taken up as early as December 3, 1995”, as printed.

• Spelling as printed in this part: “ruling stratums” (PDF p.142), “in principal” for in principle (PDF p.166), negotiations “to be lead” (PDF p.178), “the primarily goal” (PDF p.174), “colonialization” and “decolonializing” (PDF p.176, 184), “motif” for motive (PDF p.183), and “determent” for deterrence/deterrent throughout Chapters 4-5 — recorded as printed in the reading notes.

• PDF p.180 / printed p.171 gives Oslo II Zone A as four percent and Zone B as twenty-five percent of the West Bank (together twenty-nine percent), while PDF p.190 / printed p.181 gives Regions A and B together as twenty-seven percent and Region C as seventy-three percent — both forms recorded as printed, not resolved.

• PDF p.195 / printed p.186 says “In 1996, Peres was in his mid-eighties”, as printed; the work gives “Shimon Peres (1923–2016)” at PDF p.13 / printed p.4, which would make him seventy-two or seventy-three in 1996 — recorded as printed, not resolved. (Uri Avneri (1923–), named on the same PDF p.195, is a different person and is not the source of Peres’s birth year.)

• The Conclusion (PDF p.196-198 / printed p.187-189) calls the second founding myth the “safety myth” / “myth of safety” throughout, where Chapter 5’s earlier sections and Grinberg’s term as presented at PDF p.160-161 are “security myth” — both terms recorded as printed in their places.

• PDF p.190 / printed p.181 gives “elections for the presidency and the Palestinian Counsel”, as printed, for the January 1996 Palestinian elections.

• The Beilin/Abu-Masen Paper’s terms at PDF p.193 / printed p.184 give the remaining six percent of the West Bank with the parenthesis “seventy-five percent of which were Jewish settlements” — what the seventy-five percent measures is not further specified as printed.

• Bibliography as printed: “Sisyphus’ Catch: Shomon Peres” for Shimon Peres (PDF p.200), “Neurberger” (PDF p.203), “Ehud Sprinak” as co-editor in the Sprinzak entry (PDF p.204), Sharett (1957) “first published: OT, 1.9.1966” (PDF p.204), and the Internet sources list’s “ag-friedensforschung.d” without the final “e” (PDF p.205) — all recorded as printed in the reading notes.

• The Index of Persons gives “Pollard, Jonathan” (PDF p.207), against “John Pollard” in the text at PDF p.86, and “Genosar, Yossi” (PDF p.206), against “Ginossar” as printed at PDF p.91 — both index forms recorded as printed.

• PDF p.198 / printed p.189 ends a sentence “the dead end it is currently locked”, as printed, without a closing “in”.

Coverage

PDF p.1-209 of 209, read in full in parts 1-5 of 5